GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Published by D.A.P./San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Edited by Corey Keller. Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer Blessing.

Artists who arrive fully formed at a young age always dazzle, and Francesca Woodman was one of the most gifted and dazzling artist prodigies in recent history. In 1972, the 13-year-old Woodman made a black-and-white photograph of herself sitting at the far end of a sofa in her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her face is obscured by her hair, light radiates from an unseen source behind her out at the viewer through her right hand. This photograph typifies much of what would characterize Woodman's work to come: a semi-obscured female form merging with or flailing against a somewhat bare and often dilapidated interior. In an oeuvre of around 800 photographs made in just nine years, Woodman performed her own body against the textures of wallpaper, door frame, baths and couches, radically extending the Surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun and creating a mood and language all her own. In the 30 years since her untimely death, Woodman has gained a following among successive generations of artists and photographers, a testament to her work's undeniable immediacy and enduring appeal Amid a renewed intensification of interest in Francesca Woodman, this volume is published for a major touring exhibition of her photographs and films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Containing many previously unpublished photographs, it is the definitive Francesca Woodman monograph.Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was born in Denver, Colorado, to the well-known artists George and Betty Woodman. In 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1979 she moved to New York, to attempt to build a career in photography. In 1981, at the age of 22, she committed suicide.

This volume is the first comprehensive monograph on Rineke Dijkstra to be published in the United States. The catalogue accompanies the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artist’s work in photography and video; it features the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra’s later work including her most recent video installations. Also included are series that she has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994–present), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curators Jennifer Blessing (Senior Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim) and Sandra S. Phillips (Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); an interview with the artist by Jan van Adrichem; interviews with the artist’s subjects by Sophie Derkzer; short texts on the artist’s series by Chelsea Spengemann; and the most comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography to date. Rineke Dijkstra came to prominence in the 1990s with her celebrated Beach Portraits, large-scale color photographs of children on the verge of adolescence posed on beaches around the world, from South Carolina to the Ukraine. From that point on, her sensitive and visually riveting portraits have documented individuals caught in transitional states, sometimes due to physical exertion, for example after giving birth or dancing, or charted over time through series. Along with other Western European photographers such as Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, Dijkstra has been a leading innovator in the production of large-scale color images, which came to define contemporary photography in the 1990s and have transformed it ever since.

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter and technologies, these arts can embody a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines the myriad ways by which photographic imagery is incorporated into recent art practices, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media—while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession with accessing and retrieving the past. The works included in Haunted range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, to videos, film, performance and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim collection and its recent acquisitions, Haunted features major artists such as Marina Abramovi?, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anthony Hernandez, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sara VanDerBeek, Jeff Wall and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the survey is dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists such as Walead Beshty, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht and Idris Khan.

This comprehensive new exhibition catalogue, published to accompany the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's major mid-career survey of Catherine Opie's work, is the first to gather all of the artist's key projects to date in a single volume. Opie is best known for her subtle but potent portraits of people from the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this definitive volume, each of Opie's series--among them Portraits, Freeways, Domestic, Icehouses and In and Around Home--is reproduced in full color plates alongside works that were not displayed in the exhibition, allowing for the most complete overview of this important Los Angeles artist's work to date. In addition, this volume features a lead essay by exhibition curator Jennifer Blessing, which surveys Opie's artistic career and its historical contexts; a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson, Chair of the Department of Art at UCLA; and a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores many concerns similar to Opie's. It also includes introductory essays on each of the artist's series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography, making it the primary source for future research on Opie's work. Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently Professor of Photography at UCLA. Opie's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Text by Jennifer Blessing, Katrin Blum.

Jeff Wall: Exposure introduces four new large-scale black-and-white photographs by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Presented publicly for the first time in an accompanying special exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, this new work is shown alongside earlier pieces--both black-and-white photographs as well as transparencies mounted in light boxes--to create an ensemble that resonates formally and thematically. Wall has long been interested in the language of Realism, in the values and aesthetics of representing daily life. All of the pictures realistically portray desolate places and people in straitened circumstances typical of contemporary society. This focused catalogue, with essays by Guggenheim Museum Curator of Photography Jennifer Blessing and Katrin Blum, aptly demonstrates Wall’s continuing interrogation of the history of photographic representation--here specifically the legacies of documentary photography and Neorealist film.

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Text by Rebecca Solnit, Jennifer Blessing.

True North features the work of contemporary artists whose photographic or video-based work evokes the formal conventions of Northern Romantic landscape painting as well as its legacy in later nineteenth-century photography. Yet unlike their Romantic antecedents, the works in this exhibition are historically and politically self-reflexive and problematize the notion of a pure, unchangeable North. Rather than report a uniquely Northern essence or truth, this presentation is premised on the idea that our visions of the North are structured through our own varying positions. A fantastical place of fear, desire, refuge, conquest and decay, the North has played an increasingly important role in the work of contemporary artists interested in the socio-political issues of colonization and pollution, as well as aesthetic notions of the sublime. Accompanying a spring 2008 exhibition at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, this catalogue includes entries on the featured artists: Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Elger Esser, Thomas Flechtner, Roni Horn, Armin Linke and Orit Raff. In the introduction, Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim Museum, sketches a theoretical framework for the exhibition, linking the recent focus on Northern locales to the qualities of the photographic medium itself. Rebecca Solnit's poetic essay gathers together personal recollections, reflections on literature and environmental and political concerns to explore various cultural fantasies and symbols associated with the North.

Originally, Solomon R. Guggenheim donated works from his collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which he began in 1937 to support and promote non-objective art. Then, in 1939, he established the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952, and its signature Frank Lloyd Wright building opened on New York's Fifth Avenue in 1959. Over time, the Guggenheim has expanded the type of art that it exhibits and collects through the addition of other great collections--notably, those of Karl Nierendorf, Peggy Guggenheim, Justin and Hilde Thannhauser, and Giuseppe Panza di Biumo--as well as through opportunities that resulted from the institution's increasingly international focus in more recent decades. The Guggenheim today encompasses venues on two continents: the museum in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas. This volume is published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn. With its comprehensive presentation of masterworks from the Guggenheim's extended holdings, it provides insight into Modern and Contemporary art movements--from Impressionism to Cubism, Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and Minimalism to the most recent developments--and the distinctive features of the collection. The selection emphasizes the Guggenheim's ongoing commitment to acquiring the work of particular artists in depth, including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and Matthew Barney, among many others.

Gender Performance in Photography

The Guggenheim's classic study of photo-based artworks that question gender identity is back in print at last. This important volume, whose title combines Gertrude Stein's famous motto, "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," with the name of Marcel Duchamp's feminine alter ego, Rrose Selavy, features portraits, self-portraits and photomontages in which the gender of the subject is highlighted through performance for the camera or through technical manipulation of the image. In many of the works, photography's strong aura of realism and objectivity promotes a fantasy of total gender transformation. In other pieces, the photographic representation articulates an incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume. Features work by Cecil Beaton, Brassa‘, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hàch, Man Ray, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Inez van Lamsweerde and Andy Warhol.

Photographs From the Buhl Collection

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Essays by Jennifer Blessing, Kirsten Hoving and Ralph Rugoff.

In October 1993, Henry M. Buhl purchased Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands. This photograph became the cornerstone of his private collection that now includes over 1,000 images by the medium's foremost practioners, as well as little-known and emerging artists. From a photogenic drawing negative made in 1840 by William Henry Fox Talbot to serial Polaroids made in 2002 by Cornelia Parker, the collection encompasses a wide range of photographic practices--scientific, journalistic, and fine art photography--with a strong component of contemporary art. Published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, these beautiful and poetic reproductions demonstrate the prevalence of the hand as a photographic theme; a result of photography's easy ability to capture fragments, details, and ephemeral movement. The images are discussed through topical texts: why hands are a unique theme (Jennifer Blessing), the prevalence of hands in Surrealist photogrpahs and prose (Kirsten A. Hoving), and the uncanny aspects of hands in contemporary art that uses photography (Ralph Rugoff). Containing work from 150 artists, this catalogue is both a visually stunning and haunting object, and a handy resource for the study of photography.

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Essays by Germano Celant, Jennifer Blessing, and Arkady Ippolitov.

Robert Mapplethorpe never concealed his interest in and passion for the human figure in all its sensuous manifestations. His celebrated black-and-white photographs from the later part of the 20th century reveled in the athletic body, the nude body, the exquisite body. This groundbreaking exhibition and its accompanying catalogue explore the relationship between the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and Classical art, in particular through Mannerist engravings and sculpture. The pairing of works is among the first collaborations between the Guggenheim Museum and the State Hermitage Museum. Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition exemplifies the artist's rapport with the elongated and elaborate forms of Mannerist art, namely the study of the human body, highlighting the underlying classicism evident in the clarity and potency of all Mapplethorpe's subjects as well as their explosive energy. The classical ideal was not only a poetic inspiration but also an ethical model and, in his creative quest, Mapplethorpe described photography as "the perfect way to make a sculpture." The potency of love and Eros, which electrifies many of the Mannerist works shown here, is articulated again in the work of Mapplethorpe. The vital anatomical forms of his portraits of models such as bodybuilder Lisa Lyons and the statuesque Derrick Cross find their roots in Antiquity, and here they find their mirror in the likes of Jan Harmensz Muller's Sabine woman and Jacob Matham's Apollo.

The Hermitage's superb collection of Italian painting and sculpture amply illustrates the course of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the 18th century and includes an impressive collection of Mannerist works. Approximately 50 Mannerist works from the Hermitage collection are paired with the same number of works by Mapplethorpe from the Guggenheim's collection, are several Italian, French and Flemish bronze sculptures from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Essays by the curators are included: Addressing the return to Classicism at the end of the 16th, 19th, and 20th centuries, Arkady Ippolitov discusses the obsession that defines both the work of Mapplethorpe and the Mannerists. Germano Celant's text further explores the influence this 16th-century style had on Mapplethorpe's artistic practice and sensibility, illuminating the artist's interest in the study of pure form as well as allegorical imagery. Articulated in both word and image, the catalogue also traces Mapplethorpe's complex relationship to the history of art more broadly, ranging from Neoclassicism to Surrealism, with comparisons to the work of Jacques-Louis David, Antonio Canova, Auguste Rodin, Man Ray, and more. A third essay by Guggenheim Curator Jennifer Blessing traces allegorical representations in 19th- and 20th-century photography, with references to Mapplethorpe's oeuvre.

From Picasso to Pollock highlights the history of the aesthetic vanguard from early Modernism through Abstract Expressionism. With distinctive focus yet remarkable comprehensiveness, From Picasso to Pollock unites the major artists and developments of the first half of the twentieth century through significant examples of non-objective, Cubist, Surrealist, Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture. A deep and broad assembly of masterpieces has been chosen from the Guggenheim's formative collection, and through it the viewer may perceive the era of Modern art emerging in all its diversity and complexity. Included here are reproductions of and short texts on seminal works by Brancusi, Braque, Chagall, de Kooning, Delaunay, Ernst, Fontana, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Malevich, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani, Mondrian, Popova and Schiele. Narrative biographies on a number of these artists are included, as well as a short, illustrated history of the collection by Lisa Dennison. From Picasso to Pollock is the second in a trilogy from the Guggenheim which highlights the greatest strengths of the museum's collection. The first title, Moving Pictures, showcased contemporary photography and video, and the third, Primary Forms, considered Minimalism, Conceptualism and their more contemporary progeny.

Photographs from the Buhl Collection

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Essays by Jennifer Blessing, Kirsten Hoving and Ralph Rugoff. Foreword by Henry Buhl and Thomas Krens.

In October 1993, Henry M. Buhl purchased a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands. This photograph would come to be the cornerstone of a private collection that now includes over one thousand images by the medium's foremost practitioners as well as little-known and emerging artists. Focusing on the theme of the hand, Buhl has gathered images spanning the history of photography, from a photogenic drawing negative made in 1840 by William Henry Fox Talbot to serial Polaroids made in 2002 by Cornelia Parker. The collection also encompasses a comprehensive range of photographic practices, including scientific, journalistic, and fine-art photography, with a strong component of contemporary art. Published on the occasion of a major exhibition drawn from The Buhl Collection, this book demonstrates the prevalence of the hand as a photographic theme, a result, in part, of photography's easy ability to capture fragments and detail, as well as ephemeral movement. The selected works depict the hand literally, in the context of portraiture, for example, as well as figuratively, in terms of the poetic emphasis given to hand gestures in documentary images. In artistic images created from the 1920s to the present, the hand is abstracted and subsequently treated as a conceptual device.

Jennifer Blessing explores the nature of collecting photographs and why hands are in many ways a uniquely photographic theme. Kirsten A. Hoving emphasizes the prevalence of hands in Surrealist photographs and prose. Ralph Rugoff discusses the uncanny aspects of hands in contemporary art that uses photography. The catalogue entries, written by Matthew S. Witkovsky with Melanie Mariìo and Nat Trotman, cover 150 artists and 168 works, forming a useful resource for the study of the history of photography.

Now in Paperback! This lavishly illustrated book explores a century of modern art through the exceptional holdings of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Engaging, accessible essays introduce a range of art-historical issues, from the depiction of women in Impressionist works to the Guggenheim's influential role in presenting new artistic currents, such as Minimalist, Conceptual and site-specific art. Also recounted are the fascinating stories of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who championed abstract art in the United States, and his flamboyant niece Peggy Guggenheim, an equally important art patron, as well as the saga of the design process and building of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpieces.

Published by Guggenheim Museum.Edited by Nancy Spector. Essays by Jennifer Blessing and Bridget Alsdorf.

Revised, expanded and completely redesigned, this latest edition of the Guggenheim Museum's popular guide to its New York collection is a beautifully produced volume, not only a handy overview of the museum's holdings but a concise, engaging primer on twentieth-century art. Organized alphabetically, the book consists of entries on more than 250 of the most important paintings, sculptures and other artworks in the collection by artists from Marina Abramovic to Gilberto Zorio. Also included are definitions of key terms and concepts of modern art, from “Action” to “Non-Objective” and beyond. The Guggenheim Museum Collection is beloved for this wealth of masterpieces by leading modern artists, such as Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. Reflecting the recent growth in the collection, this 2001 edition includes new entries on such artists as Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman, among others. The text is by the museum's curators as well as prominent authors and scholars, including Dore Ashton, Gary Garrels and Rosalind Krauss.